A Star Called Henry

  —Quite right too, he said.—It’s shite. But its heart’s in the right place.

  And he sang to the lit windows of the Rotunda. The pride of all Gaels was young Henry Smart.

  That stopped me. I nearly fell onto the street. Jack laughed at my shock. He held me up by my collar.

  —You didn’t know they were singing about you, did you, Henry?

  —No, I said.—I haven’t heard that one.

  —You haven’t been listening. It’s doing the rounds, man. I heard Dev himself singing it when he was in solitary. He hasn’t a note in his head.

  —Who wrote it? I asked him.

  —Who knows? he said.—The people. That’s where all the real songs come from. Come on now. I’m starving.

  —Sing the rest of it, will yeh.

  —Tomorrow, he said.

  He had tea and bread and butter and thick slices of cooked ham and even a hunk of porter cake. I felt them all settle down inside me and the sugar in the tea told me that life was just great as I sat on the floor and listened to Jack. He wasn’t a born docker; my reading of his hands had been right. He was an architect, but wasn’t going back to it until after the revolution. He didn’t have time for blueprints or building.

  —What revolution? I said.

  I’d had my fill of revolution; I thought I had.

  —The one that’s coming, he said.—It’s on the way, man.

  When the country was free, when the last Englishman was on a boat or in a box, then he’d start designing houses that were fit for people. He’d build halls and cathedrals. Dublin would be a jewel again. We’d go at every reminder of the Empire with a wrecking ball made from all the balls and chains that had fettered the people for centuries. There’d be no evidence left of England by the time we stopped for a rest and our dinner.

  —We’ll have no use for granite, he said.—It’s the stone of the empire builder.

  —But it comes from Wicklow, I said.

  —Along with most of the other traitors and Protestants who’ve made our country’s history such a misery. Don’t talk to me about Wicklow. Renegades and adulterers, the lot of them. We’ll have our own architecture, man.

  He could deliver sense and shite in the one sentence. And it struck me even then, although I didn’t think much about it at the time, that his Ireland was a very small place. Vast chunks of it didn’t fit his bill; he had grudges stored up against the inhabitants of most of the counties. His republic was going to be a few blameless pockets, connected to the capital by vast bridges of his own design. But I liked listening to him and loved the idea of knocking down Dublin and starting afresh. I’d roll my sleeves up for that particular job.

  —So what’ll you do when you’ve built the turf post office? I said.

  —I’ll build a bridge across the Liffey and name it after you, he told me.

  And I believed him. The pride of all Gaels was young Henry Smart. The night before I’d been homeless and alone and now I was warm and full, in the wild and generous company of Jack Dalton, my new friend and old comrade in arms. The plans and dreams rolled out of him that night and other long nights.

  —And when I’m finished with Dublin I’m going home to Limerick. I’ll tell you, man, it’ll be the Venice of the west by the time I put down my pencil.

  And by the time he announced that he had the legs walked off his tongue and he needed some sleep for the next day, I was ready to die again for Ireland; me, who had never been further than Lucan, who less than a year before had jumped over the bodies of friends lying dead and destroyed, who would never have given a fuck what de Valera sang in his prison cell. I was ready to die for Ireland. I was ready to die for Limerick. Ready to fall dead for a version of Ireland that had little or nothing to do with the Ireland I’d gone out to die for the last time.

  I lay on Jack’s floor and slept well and dreamt of nothing at all. We walked down to work together the next morning and collected our wages together and by dark that night I was a Volunteer. And when we got back to Cranby Row there was a mattress waiting for me where the bare floor had been the night before.

  —Where did this come from? I said as I fell back and let the mattress cuddle me.

  —I told you already, said Jack.—The landlord’s one of us.

  —Good man, the landlord, I said.—Fresh straw as well.

  —Fresh straw in every mattress, said Jack.—It’s only a matter of time.

  —That sounds like socialism.

  —What it is, said Jack,—is a lot of straw in a country full of straw. It’s an easy enough promise to keep. And don’t be bothering yourself with socialism. That stuff’s only old Jewish shite.

  The next weeks and months were the best of the war, when none but a few - and I thought I was one of them - knew that there was a war. Long before a shot was fired, an ambush or an execution. It was the prelude, the build-up, and I was in at the beginning. Like Jack, I was in the First Battalion, F Company, the Company made up of recruits from the area north of the Liffey. And, like Jack, I caused a silent stir when I walked into the room. I was one of the legends, one of the survivors of Easter Week. I was Fergie Nash every morning on the Custom House Dock when I waited for the stevedore to shout that name - and he did, every morning when I was there, from then on - but every night I was Henry Smart again. They gawked at me like I was an apparition, one of the executed men come back. They were afraid to speak to me, scared even to meet my glance; their arses hovered over their chairs, in case I wanted to evict them. It was heady stuff; I was a walking saint. And there were women there too, secretly looking at me. I’d forgotten for a while what that was like. I’d hear their talk and whispers, the boys and girls, before I entered the room, and I quickly loved the silence and adoration that were coming my way.

  We met at 25 Rutland Square, in rooms rented by the Gaelic League. We came and left through different doors, carried copybooks and pencil cases to prove to G-men and their lurkers that we were there for our Irish lessons. I’d seen death and handed it out, only a year before; I’d seen the G-men taking men away to be shot; they’d stared into my face looking for the excuse to do the same to me - but there was nothing like the excitement now of walking past a frozen G-man in a trenchcoat, in a Rutland Square doorway. The sheer fun of it: for the first time in my life I was behaving like a kid.

  —That’s a cold one, Sergeant.

  We were laughing our way to the new Ireland. Robbing apples for Ireland. Crawling over roofs, spitting down on the G-men, dropping slates to their feet. Shouting down names at them.

  —Hey there, Bollicky! Does your mammy know you hang around street corners?

  —How much for a ride, Sergeant?

  Bringing them out cups of tea.

  —Enjoy that now, Sergeant, because one of these days, man, we’re going to shoot you.

  He laughed because he was afraid not to. He looked down the street, to the safety of another trenchcoat in another doorway.

  —Would your friend like a cup or will yis share?

  —I don’t want it, said the G-man.

  —You’ll have the biscuits at least, said Jack.—They’re Irish, like ourselves.

  —No.

  —We could have them delivered for you, said Jack.—We know where you live.

  We walked back into the hall before the G-man could gather himself.

  —Do we really know where he lives? I asked Jack.

  —No, said Jack.—But we will.

  For those first months, before Dublin Castle knew how to cope with us, we flaunted our secrecy, right up to their faces. Jack had done his spell in jail. We both knew the fizz of passing bullets. There wasn’t much that could frighten us. We’d already won.

  Annie noticed the change in me.

  —Jesus Christ, she said.

  She climbed down from where I’d ridden her, up on to my shoulders. In the last seconds, before I came - she’d got there a good minute before me - her fingers couldn’t reach my back. They lost touch with my shoulders and
she’d been singing a cappella. Her head was close to the ceiling.

  —Who’s been feeding you meat?

  —No one, Annie, I said.

  —You’re up to something, anyway, she said.—Aren’t you, mister?

  —No, Annie, I said.

  —Go ’way, yeh pup. The last time you rode me like that you were crying for all your dead friends. You’re a soldier boy again. All ready to die for the dear little shamrock. Remember that letter you said you’d write to me before they shot you?

  —I do, I said.—But don’t worry. There’s no reason for me to be writing last letters.

  —Just don’t forget it. Because you’re up to something. Back on the floor, she held on to my arm; she didn’t trust her legs yet. She took a good deep breath and shook her head.

  —What about another song? she said.—It’s early yet.

  —Sorry, Annie. I’m a busy man.

  —I knew it, she said.—Dying for Ireland.

  —I’m dying for no one, I told her.—Have you heard The Bold Henry Smart yet?

  —I’m listening to him, she said.—Unless it’s a song you’re talking about.

  —Keep an ear out for it, I said.—I’d love you to play it the next time.

  —I only take my songs off the gramophone these days, said Annie.

  —Maybe that’s where you’ll hear it, I said.

  —Maybe, she said.—But I’m only listening to the ones from America. I’ve had enough of the Irish ones.

  —Maybe the Yanks’ll be singing it yet.

  And I was gone.

  Jack and I spent hours of the night in the lanes and back alleys of the north side, looking for sniping positions and escape routes. We’d been trapped in the G.P.O. and the few other outposts the year before. It wasn’t going to happen again. We were going to control the city.

  —We won’t be caught this time, man. They’ll be the ones coming out with their hands up.

  We mapped the city, planned our victory. And we ended up the nights in pubs, houses that were friendly to us, with other men who had seen action in Easter Week or had just missed it, men who had experience and, in the snugs or safe corners, we drank and laughed to the future. We were young and having a ball. The older men, the ones who were going to knock us into shape, they were still in the prison camps in England. Or they were dead: the ghosts of Easter Week followed us everywhere and we had to drink hard and quickly to be able to ignore them, and I had extra ghosts of my own to ignore. We were having our holidays before the real work started; we knew we’d deserve them. Those of us who had already killed, the old-young men of Easter Week, knew what all the nightly meetings and open furtiveness were leading us to. We were toasting our own deaths. To give up my gun they’ll need tear me apart. And every night when we were walking home Jack Dalton sang sedition. The heart of a Fenian had the bold Henry Smart.

  Sometimes, just to keep the G-men fit, we met up in the social hall of the American Rifles on North Frederick Street and, our noise disguised by the dancing classes that shook the building most nights of the week, we practised our drill.

  —Are you out for the dancing, Sergeant?

  With mop and broom handles on their shoulders and even shovels we took home from the docks, we put the youngsters through their paces. Proud sight, left right, steady boys and step together. We had them going at each other with wooden bayonets, up to their thighs in imaginary gore, all the evening while the dancing ladies and gents below hid us behind their wall of sound and the blood dripped onto their heads. The G-men must have noticed the parade of grazed knuckles and broken fingers that walked past them at the end of every evening.

  —A waste of time, said Jack.—But it’s good for morale.

  He was right. The only useful tool for bayonet practice was a bayonet. The only way to teach a man how to kill with a gun was to give him a gun and someone to kill. So we started collecting money every week, threepences and six-pences, all marked into the Quartermaster’s green book, which I minded, the money and the book, until we got round to electing a quartermaster. And we started buying guns. Dublin was a garrison town; there were more barracks than houses. The Great War still had more than a year left to run. The city was crawling with Tommies and Irish-born squaddies, and lots of them were broke and desperate enough to sell their rifles to us. Officers, even Unionist officers, came looking for us once word got round that ready cash could be had from the Shinners in exchange for working weapons. We gave four quid each for Lee-Enfields. We upped it to a fiver when a colonel in the Munster Rifles threw in his Official Army Military Manual with the gun, as well as a box of bullets and a map of Dublin Castle. We carried the manual around inside the covers of a book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the few that Granny Nash hadn’t wanted.

  —I had an Uncle Tom, she said.—I won’t to waste my time reading about another one.

  —What was there between Alfie Gandon and my father, Granny?

  —Everything.

  —What does that mean?

  —Everything.

  I could smell women again. And I could look up at the stars again and grin.

  —Oh Henry Henry HenREEE!

  I shouted at the black sky.

  —Are you looking!?

  —Oh mother! Who are you talking to?

  —Relax, relax. Just my brother.

  —Where where?

  —He’s dead.

  —I want to go home now.

  —No, you don’t. Lean back against the wall there and I’ll tell you how we charged the G.P.O.

  Me and Jack just had to look in the door of a céilí or concert, a fund raiser for the dependants of the dead and jailed of Easter Week, and the women of the Gaelic League and Cumann na mBan were queuing up for their own three minutes of immortality - longer, maybe, if they went with Jack, but Piano Annie had trained me well. I loved women again. All of them. And I wasn’t looking for a new mother or a shoulder to cry on or hair to bawl into, a dinner, a bed for the night, someone to listen to me. I was just doing what came natural: I was fucking women who wanted to fuck me. I was a living, breathing hero - and the best-looking man in the room, owner of the eyes that brought tears to the fannies of every woman who ever as much as glanced at them. I scored at every céilí, sometimes two and three times before the night was over and we all had to stand for The Soldier’s Song, and I never once had to dance. And I never paid in; I was my own dependant. I often didn’t make it through the door. I’d go up and they’d be waiting for me. They shared me. I wasn’t interested in conquest. But I didn’t have to be. I ended up riding the unconquerable, the unimaginable.

  I felt the floor hop under me - there were three hundred women and men next door doing The Walls of Limerick - as I pushed in from behind. She leaned her hands against the toilet door, keeping intruders out and helping me in. The choice of venue was mine, the position hers. This was something I did four and five times a week. I remember them all, every woman, but this one stands out: I was riding the arse off the mother of one of 1916’s executed heroes. I won’t name names. Her son’s portrait was wobbling on the opposite side of the wall as the dancers cantered past him and his grieving mammy backed into me. But I won’t name names. Her husband was taking the money at the door.

  And another girl, another cold night, rummaged in her coat pocket after we’d gone for a walk and found a lane off Gardiner Place and a wall that would act as a bed.

  —Will you do a favour for me, Mister Smart?

  —Henry.

  —I couldn’t—

  —Henry, I said.

  —Ah, I can’t.

  —Ah, go on.

  —Henry, so. Will you do me a favour?

  —Sure, I said.—What?

  She took her hand from her pocket.

  —Will you bless my beads for me?

  And I did.

  I met them all and I never got tired. I loved arriving at the steaming door of a céilí in full flight and waiting there; I’d close my eyes for the surprise of age, size
, skin. But always, always, before closing my eyes, I looked first for Miss O’Shea. But she was never there. And when I opened them again, she still wasn’t there.

  We paraded with banned hurleys, we saluted in public. We nailed a flag and greased the pole and watched the rozzers climbing and sliding. We learnt our tricks from the Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin films we watched all afternoon in the La Scala when the stevedore gave us the day off. We got in for nothing. The staff were sympathisers and came to all the céilís when they weren’t working. We ambushed pigs on their way to Britain. Our own butchers slaughtered them in a yard beside Binns’ Bridge and we delivered them to Donnelly’s bacon factory in the Coombe - Irish pigs, Irish labour, Irish stomachs - in a procession across the city, dozens of carcasses on four drays, our men with Lee-Enfields guarding both sides of the bridge as we crossed the Liffey. And now, as we rattled through the narrow streets of the Coombe, the people who’d spat on us not long before applauded.

  Somewhere in the excitement of ambush and convoy I remembered my time in Liberty Hall. I looked at the sharp, angry cheekbones of the women we passed and the skinny, meatless legs of the children who ran beside us.

  —We should give this bacon out to the people, I said to Jack as I steered the cart onto Patrick Street.

  —No, Henry, he said.—Not a good idea. We don’t want to interfere with internal trade or anything like that. What we want to do is show everyone that we can run our own country. We have to show the factory owners and the rest of them that these things will go on without the English. And that they’ll go on even better without them.

  We turned off Patrick Street, onto Hanover Lane.

  —These people know what all this means, he said.

  He nodded back at the dead pigs behind us and the other drays following us.

  —Jobs, he said—Making bacon and making the money to buy the bacon. That’s what this is all about. Keeping our own money. We get rid of the English and everybody’s happy, man. Everybody. The owners, the workers. Even the pigs because they died for Ireland.

  He had everything figured.

  —This is just the beginning, Henry. We’re going to take over everything. Commerce, the post, the courts, tax collection. The works, man. We’ll run the country like they’re not even here. And all the time we’ll be persuading them to go.